About Me

A drawing of the author, lacking a few recent grey hairs.

My name is Paul; I'm a roughly 42 year old writer, artist and programmer with a PhD in Informatics and an increasing sense of existential dread.

Most of my professional career has been as a researcher in computer science and artificial intelligence—the old form, before the generative AI boom. Think expert systems, defeasible reasoning, predicate logic, things like that. I've worked in Scotland and the Netherlands, but am currently back in Scotland, pondering my life choices.

Here on this site I mostly post my digital artwork: illustrations of devils and demigoddesses, magi and fey, and anything else that takes my fancy. I have been known to write short articles, or rather longer creative interpretations ("Let's Plays") of games I've played. Possibly I should do more of that.

I don't use LLMs or other forms of generative AI for anything on this website. Why would I? That would be automating away the fun part. I like building things from scratch; I'm crazy like that. 

I also sometimes take commissions! Basically anything that lets me draw what I like to draw, but I'm particularly interested in producing artwork for boardgames, TTRPGs other gaming-related things with a fantasyish theme. Prices are generally set case-by-case, and are basically determined by the number of hours of labour I estimate would be required to finish the work, factoring in revisions and other potential complications. If I don't retain copyright, it'll cost you more.

If you want to contact me for commissions or anything else related to this website, I can be contacted via the email (ravanon [at] outlook [dot] com), or in the Fediverse (Mastodon and related clients/platforms that use ActivityPub to communicate—my handle is @ravanon@mastodon.scot).